/cs-engineer-grill

Slash Command Source

Walk the user through the Matt Pocock forcing-question discipline before they lock any engineering decision. This is the grill-with-docs pattern (canon-anchored, recommended answers, kill criteria) applied across the three engineering role lanes.

$ARGUMENTS

Routing protocol

1. Detect lane signals in the user's prompt:
2. Fullstack signals: "scaffold", "stack", "Next.js + Postgres", "monorepo", "deploy", "team size", "budget", "cadence"
3. Frontend signals: "React", "Next", "Remix", "Vite", "Astro", "bundle", "LCP", "INP", "CLS", "a11y", "WCAG", "Tailwind", "design system"

4. Backend signals: "API", "REST", "GraphQL", "database", "Postgres", "MongoDB", "schema", "migration", "QPS", "tenancy", "SLO", "Kafka", "queue", "microservice", "monolith"

5. If --lane <name> is supplied: walk only that lane's 7 questions.

6. If lane signals score ≥ 3 hits for one lane: confirm with the user, then walk that lane's 7 questions.
7. If lane signals are ambiguous OR --lane all: ask the user: "Fullstack (7 Qs about team / stack / scale), Frontend (7 Qs about device / rendering / bundle / a11y), or Backend (7 Qs about QPS / tenancy / pattern / SLO)? Or all for all 21."

Lane: fullstack

Questions live in engineering-team/skills/senior-fullstack/references/forcing_questions.md. Summary:

1. Team size today + 12-month headcount?
2. Deployment cadence — per-PR, daily, weekly, quarterly?
3. Customer-facing, internal tool, or marketing site?
4. One-year p50 / p99 traffic forecast?
5. Hiring against the stack or training the team?
6. Year-one monthly cloud + SaaS ceiling?
7. Three verifiable success criteria with numeric targets?

Lane: frontend

Questions live in engineering-team/skills/senior-frontend/references/forcing_questions.md. Summary:

1. Primary device + network (mobile-4G / desktop-fiber / low-end Android / corporate)?
2. LCP target in ms (and INP, CLS)?
3. RSC / SPA / SSR / SSG — pick and defend?
4. JS bundle budget per route in KB-gzip?
5. SEO-dependent or auth-walled?
6. Design-system source of truth?
7. WCAG target + named a11y owner?

Lane: backend

Questions live in engineering-team/skills/senior-backend/references/forcing_questions.md. Summary:

1. Read/write ratio + p99 QPS forecast?
2. Tenancy model — single / shared / isolated?
3. Sync / async / event-driven — default + exceptions?
4. Data sensitivity tier — PII / PHI / PCI?
5. Monolith / modular monolith / microservices — team-size justification?
6. RPO + RTO?
7. SLO + named error-budget consumer?

Discipline (Matt Pocock, MIT, preserved verbatim from engineering/grill-me)

1. One question per turn. Never bundle. Never default to "what do you think?".
2. Always recommend an answer. Format: "Recommended: , because ".
3. Walk depth-first. Finish a lane before opening another.
4. Surface the kill criterion. If the user's answer trips it, STOP and resolve before continuing.
5. Track answers. Write to /tmp/engineer-grill-<lane>-<date>.md so the conversation survives compaction.

After the grill

1. Run the lane's decision engine with the seven answers:
2. Fullstack → python engineering-team/skills/senior-fullstack/scripts/fullstack_decision_engine.py ...
3. Frontend → python engineering-team/skills/senior-frontend/scripts/frontend_decision_engine.py ...
4. Backend → python engineering-team/skills/senior-backend/scripts/backend_decision_engine.py ...
5. Surface the matched profile + named approvers.
6. Recommend the next sub-skill chain based on the composition map.

Output expectations

• One artifact per lane walked, written to /tmp/engineer-grill-<lane>-<date>.md.
• One final digest (≤ 250 words) summarizing the matched profile per lane + the three highest-leverage next actions.
• Never auto-approve a stack change, schema migration, or architecture choice.

Related commands

• /cs:fullstack-review, /cs:frontend-review, /cs:backend-review — single-lane deep dives
• /karpathy-check — Karpathy review before commit
• /cs:grill-bizops, /cs:grill-commercial — sibling cross-domain grills (BizOps + Commercial v2.8.0)